I started to think about this today after locating a nice 10/100 Nubus card for $2.99 at a local used computer store.

The 3 best 68K Macs made were the Quadra 950 (Most expandable), Quadra 650 (Fastest desktop 33MHz) and Quadra 840AV (Fastest minitower 40Mhz). Well, I've got the last two My 650 is currently running A/UX 3.1 with y2k patches, but it is extremely hard to get new software to work on it. Half the stuff won't compile and the half that does gets random Bus errors and SegFaults.

I got lucky with the two Quadras they were both $10 each at that same computer store about a year and half ago as they were just clearing out all their CISC Mac stuff. Compiling wouldn't be much of an issue provided that a 32bit Motorola 68k target is added to Crossdev.

(nudge nudge wink wink)

I never really thought about it until now, but Gentoo is kinda the NetBSD of Linuxes. It already runs on nearly anything with a 32bit cpu. One guy even bootstrapped a tarball on a Playstation2. (If I ever manage to get a Dreamcast, that might be worth taking a look at as well)_________________Inspiron 4100 & Sun UltraAXe
Portage on Solaris|Dell Laptop Hacks
The way you feel about organized religion is the same way I feel about organized socialism.

Nah, that crown currently still goes to Debian with its 11 supported architectures (12 if you count the functional but unreleased AMD64 port).

Quote:

Compiling wouldn't be much of an issue provided that a 32bit Motorola 68k target is added to Crossdev.

Why is cross-compiling necessary in this instance? Just slap Debian on the machines and then build the Gentoo base system natively from there.

However, given the dog-slow nature of the hardware, I think there's really only one workable approach to producing a genuinely *useful* m68k port, and that is for Gentoo to provide a relatively static branch of the portage tree similar to NetBSD-release so that those users without an m68k compile farm of their own could have a hope of staying up-to-date. A fair number of people have shown interest in creating a server branch (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.server/687). Were somebody to actually implement such a thing, it'd be great for the prospects of an m68k port as well.

I had a quadra 950 128MB/9GB and a 900 68MB/400+2GB and used them to get a working stage3. I tooks 3 weeks to compile but it worked. I couldn't release the work and i've sold the machines a few month ago , but it works fine anyway. But don't even try to get a 2.6 kernel on them, that woudl be a waste of time. They run 2.2 and 2.4 fine._________________never forget that a cray is the only one arch that can run an endless loop in only 4 hours

On x86 hardware, it is very easy to build a gentoo system from an existing Debian system; I've done this before. The question is--what would you need to change about the stage1 tarball? You could use the ppc arch tarball as a guideline, and then just recompile the binaries statically. You might also find this helpful:

Me too! I have a Centris 650 that I dug out of the back room at work a few months ago. It's really hopped up -- 2GB SCSI disk, 48 MB RAM, and a 4x CD-R drive. I've played around with OpenBSD on the machine, and was able to build Apache 1 and PHP4. I was pretty surprised to find that it actually makes a halfways decent little low-traffic web server!